By Nicholas Vardy “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death…”
– Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
Published in 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb sold more than 3 million copies. The book turned this Stanford professor into his generation’s academic rock star.
Ehrlich became the only author Johnny Carson interviewed for an entire hour on The Tonight Show. In 1990, he won The Crafoord Prize – ecologists’ version of the Nobel Prize.
I have an unusual personal connection with Ehrlich’s book.
Back in the 1970s, each classroom of my Pittsburgh public grade school had dozens of copies of The Population Bomb lining its bookshelves.
I don’t recall ever actually studying The Population Bomb. But it’s clear that Pittsburgh Public Schools thought they might need to prepare us for the ensuing global famine.
Of course, Ehrlich’s prediction could not have been more wrong.
The Population Bomb Fizzles
Fast-forward to 2018, and the obesity rate in the U.S. is among the highest in the world.
The biggest health problem isn’t that Americans are starving.
It’s that Americans are eating too much.
History is littered with experts – and not just leaders of fringe cults – who predicted the end of the world and got it wrong.
Ehrlich is just one in a long line of such doom-and-gloomers. His thinking traces directly back to the original Cassandra of famines, Thomas Malthus, the English economist best known for his theory of population.
In his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that as human populations grow exponentially, food production will not keep pace.
His conclusion?
Unless men refrain from “pursuing the dictate of nature in an early attachment to one woman,” the world will run out of food and famines will ensue.
No doubt inspired by Malthus, Ehrlich dutifully limited his own family to one child.
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A Famously Bad Commodity Investment
University of Maryland economist Julian Simon was a vociferous critic of the Ehrlich-inspired famine mania of the 1970s.
He wanted to put Ehrlich’s predictions to the test.
So in 1980, Simon issued a challenge to all Malthusians.
He offered to let anyone pick any natural resource – grain, oil, coal, timber, metals – and any future date.
Any Malthusian would argue that as the world’s population increased and the commodity became scarcer, its price should rise.
Simon was willing to take the opposite side of the bet, saying that the price of the commodity would decline instead.
Ehrlich snidely accepted “Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in.”
He bet $1,000 and covered the price of five metals over a period of 10 years.
By the time 1990 rolled around, the world’s population had grown by more than 800 million, or 17.8% – the highest rate of increase over the course of a decade in history.
Yet the price of each of the commodities in the Simon-Ehrlich bet tumbled. The price of copper had fallen by 3.5%. Tin had collapsed by 72%.
In short, Ehrlich lost the bet decisively.
Simon offered to raise the stakes of the …read more
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